Expedient notification of first responders and the public is often crucial to help avoid catastrophic loss of property and life, and there are many alert notification systems known in the art. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) system is a nationwide available radio-based system over which diverse weather and other warnings are broadcast. Further examples for nationwide systems include the emergency alert system (EAS) that provides a broad spectrum of alerts and notifications. To avoid alerts to communities that are not affected by an emergency, numerous nationwide emergency signals are transmitted using the Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME), which will activate alert systems only in a community with matching SAME code.
Additionally, numerous individual communities have their own, emergency-specific warning systems for first responders and other members of the public. For example, first responders (and in some cases also civilians) in a community proximal to a weapons storage facility, chemical plant, or other potentially hazardous facility may have a local radio-based transmission system that will alert the first responders to an emergency or a drill. While local alert systems often provide various advantages over nationwide alert systems, numerous difficulties remain. For example, where multiple and distinct potential hazards are present that require multiple and overlapping first responder personnel, such first responders need to use multiple alert systems.
To overcome at least some of these problems, local alert systems can be employed that include a receiver that is configured to receive both, NOAA transmitted warnings and alerts transmitted using a local system (e.g., ONALERT™ by Warning Systems, Inc.). While such systems advantageously allow to monitor two distinct alert and notification systems, various problems remain. Among other things, any NOAA-based alert automatically overrides any local alert. Such override is especially problematic where NOAA transmits an alert with relatively low criticality while the local station transmits a high-priority alert. Still further, such systems are typically pre-programmed to the local communication path (e.g., radio transmission at a predetermined frequency band). Therefore, and especially where a first responder from a community using such a system travels to a different community using a distinct local system, the alert system will typically not be responsive in the new community.
More recently, certain NOAA alert systems have been described (see e.g., U.S. Pat. App. No. 2004/0048573) in which the alert receiver has a capability to update the alert receiver with respect to the receiver's position. These systems therefore allow a user to hear alerts that are specific to the area in which the user is present provided the alert is SAME encoded. However, such systems typically do not update the receiver with respect to availability of local alert frequencies.
Therefore, while numerous alert notification systems are known in the art, all or almost all of them suffer from one or more disadvantages. Thus, there is still a need to provide improved alert notification systems.